Friday Night Linkdump
on April 27, 2012 at 10:01 PMWe start with a trailer for the previously mentioned Portal 2 Infinite Testing Initiative, complete with Cave Johnson voiceover:
In related news, scientists have claimed they’ve created a small crystal that works like a quantum computer. Said computer is so powerful (by whatever measure they’re using) that you’d need a contemporary silicon computer the size of the universe to match it. It’s just as well we have the crystal one. Crystals are cool and I barely have enough room to keep my stuff out of the rain as it is. Moving on:
• Life’s uncertain, so here’s dessert first: An amazingly detailed Minecraft cake.
• A video project finally answers the mystery of what a dog toy sees when played with by a pooch on the beach.
• Another animated Doctor Who gif for your collection.
• Disneyland Paris is rumored to be getting a new Star Wars land addition to the park. Perhaps this is what inspires a future Jean-Luc Picard to join Starfleet?
• Those who think there aren’t enough ASCII games on green screens will treasure Battle for ASCIIon. Pilot your keyboard-character ship in a side-scrolling arcade-level-difficult game to see how many things you can make explode.
Checking the Nature paper reveals that this isn’t a general-purpose quantum computer, or even a computer at all. What they’ve actually done is taken a type of physical system that they want to study (certain types of quantum spin coupling in materials), and built a different physical system (a lattice of trapped ions) that has the same type of quantum interactions within itself, in a form that’s easier to study than the original systems they were curious about.
This type of system is very hard to simulate using a conventional digital computer, so they built a model of it instead. The write-up you linked calls that a “quantum computer simulation”, but that’s stretching things a bit. The original paper just called it a “simulation” – it’s the same type of “simulation” that used ultra-cold condensates to build systems that simulated black hole event horizons and Hawking radiation a year or three back.
It’s very valuable research, and teaches us a lot about the types of system under study, but true quantum computing is a different thing entirely (it would give you a general-purpose machine that could be configured to solve any type of quantum problem rather than one specific one).
I’m all about far out advances in technology, but once in a while somebody pops up with something so beyond the limit that part of my monkey brain goes, “Hey, dude, don’t screw with that!”
Like that whole “bust open the Higgs Bosun” deal.
This smells a bit like one of them things.
This isn’t a computer yet, but imagine creating a computing engine capable of so many states and connections that by definition it actually becomes the “infinite monkeys” system. A one in 10^23 chance of developing intelligence and self-motivation suddenly becomes something 1 in 3. Or a near-certainty.
The short answer to that is, “that’s not how quantum computers _or_ AI work”.
Quantum computers are really good at simulating quantum systems… and not much else. They can solve classical computing problems faster than normal systems, but not as fast as you seem to think: brute force searches and equivalent tasks take the square root of the number of steps (so plain old digital encryption is safe; just double the key length). Any low-amplitude randomly-generated entity (AI or otherwise) is instantly lost in the noise.
AI, on the other hand, is something that pretty much only shows up when you’re _trying_ to build it, per my previous post about that.
For the Higgs boson, and particle accelerators in general, nature is already producing particles with vastly higher energy, all the time. We routinely see cosmic rays from space with energies about ten million times higher than what CERN is producing. These are produced all the time, and hit things all the time, without destroying the universe, so repeated media scare-mongering is exactly that (media scare-mongering).
Long story short, you can stop worrying.
The Portal 2 video you linked to was removed. You want http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7rZO2ACP3A&feature=player_embedded , I think…
…or I could have run into a YouTube glitch the first time I loaded this page. Nevermind…
• Disneyland Paris is rumored to be getting a new Star Wars land addition to the park. Perhaps this is what inspires a future Jean-Luc Picard to join Starfleet?
Picard was in Star Wars? Damn, no wonder I get DS9 and Phantom Menace mixed up!